Mar - Rcsoaring.com

The 2-Point-4 Chronicles
The personal experiences of the Coyote
Mike Lee, mlee8249@msn.com
This is the experiences of a pilot gone
south. 2.4 Ghz is a new frontier for many
people, with a lot of talk on theory,
application and horror that I just had to
find out if they were true or false. Most of
what we did here in the Chronicles goes
against what is recommended by the
radio manufacturers and is not endorsed
nor recommended by them. This is a
lot of experimentation, daring attempt,
and in some cases, just do it and see
what happens. Your own mileage may
vary, but we do recommend that you
follow the instructions given by the radio
manufacturers for best results.
Welcome to the 2-Point-4 Chronicles.
Let’s get right down to the reason why
the Chronicles is being written; we want
to see what we can get away with on 2.4
Ghz! This is new territory for most pilots.
This is strange stuff with short antennas,
no frequency flags, no screaming out
on the field what channel you’re on, no
more sneaking the Tx in the pit and doing
a real quick radio check without the
pin, and no more shoot downs because
someone else sneaked a Tx into the pits.
It gets even stranger with some radios
that perform frequency hopping, others
that do frequency scanning and locking,
and at least one other that (in my opinion)
doesn’t even work! But here we have
had for the past 20 years a fairly stable
RF environment in the 72-Mhz band, that
got narrow banded in 1991 for the better,
and all that stability got uprooted with
2.4. So, let’s get right down to it; let’s
jump into experiments we have done in
radio control that in some cases, people
say should not work at all, but did, and in
other cases should work, but didn’t.
First, let’s get some acronyms down.
That way you won’t be looking around for
the definitions:
• Tx – Transmitter
• Rx – Receiver
• Ghz – Gigahertz. This is 1,000,000,000
cycles per second, RF frequency.
• Mhz – Megahertz. This one million
cycles per second, RF frequency.
• RF – Radio frequency. (Or, could also
mean Rat Fink, but we won’t go there)
• CF – Carbon fiber
• G-10: A type of fiberglass material.
Typically used in circuit boards for
electronics.
Now, most of the experimentation
done here is done in a rather unusual
environment of the “carbon” world. In
the most recent 10-years, the use of
carbon fiber within the construction
of our models has greatly expanded.
It is extremely light and strong when
properly embedded into a medium, such
20 R/C Soaring Digest